DOLLS FOR DEMOCRACY—From left, Lynn Coleman, Evelyn Rubel, Marilyn Johnston and Helen Cowan were among the women who presented the Dolls for Democracy program in the Salem schools.

 

 

Beth Sholom hosts Dolls for Democracy exhibit, reception

By DEBORAH MOON

article created on: 2009-01-15T00:00:00

A historic collection of Dolls for Democracy, used to teach diversity in schools by B’nai B’rith Women (now Jewish Women International), are on display at Temple Beth Sholom in Salem.

At 6:30 p.m., Jan. 30, TBS invites the community to a reception to view the dolls and hear stories from some of the women who were involved in the project, which began in the 1950s or 1960s and continued till the early 1990s.

Helen Cowan, Merri Lynn Coleman, Evelyn Rubel and Marilyn Johnston will talk about the project and the dolls’ impact on school children. Eden Brown, whose mother Selma Brown would bring the dolls home after school presentations, will talk about the program from that perspective.

The collection at TBS includes 19 dolls and other historical memorabilia relevant to the Dolls for Democracy project. The dolls are replicas of famous people of various ethnicities and backgrounds who reflect the democratic ideals of equality and human dignity. Some of the dolls in the collection are Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., St. Francis of Assisi, Jackie Robinson, Helen Keller and Anne Frank.

Marilyn Johnston, now the human rights specialist for the city of Salem, said she became involved in the project soon after moving from the south to Salem in 1977.

“I grew up in the South in an area with very few Jewish families,” she said in a phone interview. “It was important to me to participate in cultural competency that helped people to be accepting. That goal was certainly true for the women who started this.”

“We used the dolls as a way to enter discussion on dignity and the rights of each person to full and equal opportunity,” Johnston said. “There’s more dialogue on this in the schools now, but in the 50s it was important to start that dialogue.”

Johnston said that women would take some of the dolls and a script from BBW into classrooms. She said the women would also do some research on the figures to present some little-known facts that might be pertinent to the age group they were addressing that day.

“If you talk about acceptance, you need to talk about it in a broader range,” she said. “We (Jews) are not the only ones who have not been understood. We need to talk about acceptance in terms of race, faith, ethnicity and culture.”

Salem’s BBW/JWI was the only chapter in Oregon, remaining active until the early 1990s.

Dina Linn, another TBS women active in the Dolls for Democracy project, now lives at Rose Schnitzer Manor in Portland.

In a phone interview from her apartment, she said, “I thought it was a marvelous program.”

Linn said that initially school administrations were leery of allowing a Jewish women’s group into the classrooms. So she said they presented the program to public school principals and teachers. Catholic school administrators were especially wary, fearing proselytizing, she added.

“They saw we had a wonderful message,” Linn said, of both groups, noting she later presented the program in both public and Catholic classrooms. “The dolls were exact. They were wonderful people of different faiths who offered so much to the world.”

The TBS Adult Education Committee, chaired by Sandy Resis, has planned the reception. The display was created after members of the TBS Art Committee, chaired by Maralynn Maltz, found a collection of the dolls among some history materials. The dolls will be exhibited in a display case in the foyer for a couple months.
For more information on the exhibit or reception, call TBS at 503-362-5004.